At Mouth of the Rivers of Power, a New GOP Species

TAMPA, Fla. — It's never too late to learn new things. On Sunday, for example, after several inspirational and stormy bumps on this winding American road of ours, as the blog's trip through our muddled country finally ended where we'd aimed it — in what appears to be an industrial park for hotels not far from the airport here, where we are bunking with the happy delegates from (where else?) Kansas, God be good to us — I was exposed to a new form of roadkill. Driving around this great land of ours, I have seen any number of species that discovered to their surprise that they were not faster than the pick-up with the Skynyrd mud-guards.

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(For four years in the 1980's, I spent two weeks a year in Winter Haven, the designer mudflap capital of the western world. I once actually saw mudflaps with sequins.)

Anyway, in my years in the business, along the sides of the state highways that wind through the swamps and connect the Florida freeways, one to another, I've seen dead raccoons, possums, deer, vultures, seagulls, and alligators. Sunday, though, was the first time I'd ever seen a dead pig. For about a decade now, wild hogs have been running amok in the wilds of Florida. (This appears to be the one thing that the newly expanding Florida python problem cannot quite control.) They're big and mean and they carry all kinds of loathsome diseases and they are also, apparently, slow and stupid. And, speaking of which, I am sure that it is only God's own little coincidence that, a few miles down the road, out in the middle of the deep green nowhere, there was a billboard exhorting delegates to the Republican National Committee to abandon their pledges to other candidates and nominate Sarah Palin for president.

This whole thing — the dead hog by the side of the road, and the realization that the feral swine cannot be kept in check even by the pythons, which don't belong here either — gave me pause to consider the phenomenon of invasive species. Ever since I walked into this campaign, I have thought that the one most obvious phenomenon that did not exist the last time I hung around politics for a living is the fact that there simply is no Republican establishment any more. The Republicans — back in the Taft, Vandenberg, and Nixon days — had the most established establishment there was. There was more spirited conversation to be heard between the heads on Easter Island. And even when brawls broke out — Eisenhower elbowing Taft aside, Nixon rising from the dead to drive a stake through Nelson Rockefeller — they took place within a dignified, damned near petrified establishment context. (To bury Rockefeller, Nixon had to woo and win enough of the Wall Street Republicans to cover his establishment flank, which he did by moving east and working on, well, Wall Street.) Then, in 1964, all hell broke loose. The Republicans made the conscious choice to abandon their longtime support of civil rights in order to benefit politically from the detritus of American apartheid, and the power within the party swung to the south and to the west. They nominated Barry Goldwater, who was almost a pure Bircher at that point, and he lost to Lyndon Johnson by a historic margin. But the new establishment formed out of the wreckage and, by 1980, it was ready not only to nominate Ronald Reagan, but to elect him, and then to elect him again.

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That establishment is gone now, too. There is nothing in the Republican party but invasive species.

The Christian Right is still there. The Wall Street crowd has now transmogrified into the financial-services community, which in turn has spent the past two years masquerading as a populist uprising. And, during this cycle, the largest and most devouring invasive species of all — big, anonymous corporate money — was reintroduced into the political ecosystem, courtesy of the United States Supreme Court, which played the part of the idiots who buy pythons without thinking how they're ever going to afford the rats, so they loose them into the wild and hope for the best. Now, all a candidate needs to survive as an important player in the Republican party is a decent base of support and a billionaire willing to write the checks. There has been an internal chaos barely below the surface of the entire nominating process this year. I can't imagine what it would have been like had there not been a billionaire running who could outspend the sugar-daddies funding the rest of the people in the clown car. The presence of Willard Romney and his personal fortune, and his access to people with similar personal fortunes, was the only gravitational force keeping the Republican party from spinning off into its component parts. The only thing that can conceivably be called a Republican "establishment" in 2012 is Willard Romney's wallet.

Logistically, the process hasn't got any better since the show rolled into town here a few steps ahead of what may yet become a hurricane. First, they bag everything for Monday night, a move that looks today like abject panic on the part of obvious anagram Reince Priebus. Then the storm swings west and now, having moved, among other people, Ann Romney, back a day to catch the networks, the party confronts the possibility that it may be hosting a celebration of small government in a hall full of white folks while, on the other side of the split-screen, New Orleans takes a Category 2 storm in the chops. Four years ago, the Republicans delayed their convention because a hurricane looked as though it was going to hit New Orleans, and no Republican wanted the very optic that may land on them later this week. Tampa is the strangest combination of banana-republic security and subterranean logistical clusterfk that I've ever seen,

(There was even some loose talk of "extending" the convention through Friday, as though half the delegates weren't here on a shoestring, sleeping three to a room in what has become a festival for price-gouging — Deregulation! Entrepreneurship! — with no-refund plane tickets back to Wichita for Friday morning.)

They will do their best to bring balance to themselves again this week, the Republicans will. There is a common target, and all indications are that we will see the ineffable blend of big money and low politics that has energized Republican politics for going on 50 years now. But, beneath the surface, there are dozens of rivers of pure power, unaccountable to anyone, least of all to the candidate, who has managed to channel enough of them in his direction to become the nominee of a party that, at this point, is something like the Everglades. From a distance, it looks as timeless and unchanging as it ever has. Go deep into the weeds, though, and there are creatures in the muck that never belonged there. The invasive species are the ecosystem now, and, eventually, they will take to devouring each other.